Two new books provide guidance for the left. The first is White Skin, Black Fuel: On the Danger of Fossil Fascism by Andreas Malm and the Zetkin Collective, Verso 2021. The second is Border Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism and the Rise of Racist Nationalism by Harsha Walia, Haymarket Books, 2021. Both do an outstanding job tracing the origins of the contemporary far right, including fascist currents in European and U.S. politics. In Malm’s account, the fossil fuel industry is linked to the emergence of the fascist right in global politics. Oil and natural gas corporations have a lengthy history spreading the propaganda of climate denial, which has become a fundamentally important issue for the far right and fascist movements, which have used climate denial, and financing from corporate interests, as a weapon to advance a white supremacist ideology. These movements, as both Malm and Walia show in meticulous detail, base their existence on “white replacement theory,” identifying immigrants as the leading threat to the livelihood and existence of the white race. The far right sees climate change as a “false ideology” propagated by elites that want to “replace whites” with foreigners. In addition, Walia provides exhaustive historical links between far right immigrant bashing and the institutionalization of policies furthering white supremacy as a way to oppress and subordinate the working class.
There is no “hidden working class” that the left can wean from these fascist movements. Their primary purpose is to divide, weaken and eviscerate the capacity of working people to collectively unite to fight for their interests. That’s why it’s a mistake for the left to develop a strategy that attempts to combine “left populism” with “right populism.” A left wing strategy has to start from the premise that protecting and elevating the most oppressed and vulnerable sections of the working class is fundamental to building the political capacity of workers to fight against their exploitation.
Most importantly, the rise of fascist currents in global politics that combine climate denial with immigrant bashing and white replacement theory is a threat to human survival that goes beyond working class interests per se. That’s why those of us that consider ourselves on the political “left,” have to take anti-fascist struggles seriously. That means resisting the bait that has been put forward by the far right as traps for “left collaboration.” There is an entire media ecosystem that uses “right-wing populism” as a tactic to encourage left-wing activists and organizers of working with the far right in public forums and in publications to advance a “working class nationalism” that equates working class interests with nativist immigrant bashing in opposition to capitalist “globalism.”
One such far right publication, American Affairs journal, is the brainchild of a far right Republican Julius Krein, who has embraced the fascist nationalism of Donald Trump as a way to move the Republican Party closer to a section of “white working class” voters. Of course, the editors and contributors to American Affairs could care less about working class people. They embrace far right nationalism and exclusion, epitomized by the writings of Michael Lind, who is a member of the advisory board of the journal.
Lind, in his recent book, The New Class War, prioritizes immigrant bashing and building institutions of far right nationalism to incorporate a narrow definition of the “American (read ‘white’) working class” who in his view would be better off under a protectionist national security state that zealously guarded its borders and prioritized foreign threats as a way to justify a robust program of welfare for a “deserving” section of the U.S. working class. Lind identifies his project as building a coalition capable of challenging the “managerial elite,” whom he equates with the bureaucratization of the large-scale corporation, a process that has eroded the capacity and entrepreneurial energies of a more “legitimate” entrepreneurial class that is capable of producing real innovation and national greatness. For Lind, the managerial elite operates as an unaccountable extension of monolithic global corporations whose bureaucratization and stifling of competition is the real threat to America. The solution, for Lind, is a nationalistic, America-first response that would protect U.S. businesses and workers from foreign competition and re-institute a national welfare state justified by “security threats” and committed to providing resources to re-establish an industrial base that can compete with our enemies and provide protection for deserving workers.
Lind’s retrograde far-right nationalism can appear attractive to some on the left if they just focus on Lind’s attacks on the “managerial elite,” which is actually slippery and disingenuous, as this elite is ultimately defined more by their cosmopolitanism and advanced educational credentials, than their actual wealth or class status. Lind spends most of his book attacking immigrants, whom he clearly believes are not legitimate members of his more exclusive white working class that he wants to elevate to membership in his nationalist project. Lind’s railing against identitarian projects associated with Black Lives Matter, women’s movements, and immigrant rights movements is indicative of a privileging of white male citizens whose Americanness is thereby codified artificially from centuries of racial oppression, gender discrimination and ethnocentrism, the latter of which is foundational to Lind’s project.
For sections of the “left” that see even parts of Lind’s project as something that the left can somehow take advantage of to build broader coalitions of working class power, they are deluding themselves. Lind and the entire project of the American Affairs journal rejects everything that the left must aggressively defend: a robust commitment to immigrant rights, internationalism through solidarity of workers across borders, and an unqualified support for anti-racist social justice movements. Without all of these ingredients, the left will have sold its soul and diminished the prospects for working class unity, which the far right and the fascists are counting on.
View From Left Field 